The present invention relates generally to software and, more particularly, to methods and systems for content insertion.
Display ad servers (DAS) provide a service that allows placement of display ads in a wide range of web sites. A display ad unit is defined herein to be an ad that is placed in a web page (banner ads, text ads, etc) and may include static (e.g., text, graphics and/or pictures) or dynamic content (e.g., audio, video, animation, and/or slideshow content). A web page may contain one or more tags that link to the DAS such that the DAS can supply a variable display ad when the web page is rendered. For example, banner slots have links associated with them that query the DAS for display ad units for embedding in the rendered web page. A display ad campaign is defined that will place a certain number of impressions of various display ad units at specified web sites or categories of web sites. The DAS tracks the number of impressions by receiving requests for display ad units and returning the display ad unit directly or indirectly through another server.
A DAS is not used for placement of dynamic content ads in audio or video (“AV”) content objects (hereinafter an “in-stream ad unit”). A content object is a media file that is continuously streamed or downloaded and includes in-stream ad units contiguously placed into slots defined in the content object. The content object is played by a media player, set top box, IP TV, a browser, an applet within a browser, etc.
Ad campaigns for conventional display ad units are trafficked by advertizing operations teams. The display ad units are uploaded to or referenced by the DAS, and web sites or groups of sites are targeted by the ad campaign. For example, a banner ad for a dog food product could be sent to or referenced by the DAS, and four pet-specific web sites could be targeted by this ad campaign such that 100,000 impressions of that display ad unit would be delivered to those targeted web sites. A display ad unit may include static ads, animated ads, flash ads, and video and/or audio ads for insertion into predefined banner ad locations of a web page. Advertizing operations teams are familiar with using a DAS to deliver display ads units as part of an ad campaign.
A DAS can specify display ad units that are rendered in a web site by the browser after the browser requests a link to the DAS that was placed in the web page. The ads are separate resources from the web page in which they are placed, typically referenced as an HTML link in the web page. In-stream ads units are inserted into content objects—an operation that cannot be done by the browser or the DAS. Some media players receive a playlist of content objects to aggregate in-stream ad units and content objects for contiguous playback, but in other environments, media players are unable to process a playlist of multiple content objects.
In-stream ad units that are inserted into content objects before streaming to a content object player are done in a static fashion. Unlike the DAS that can dynamically move around display ad units to different sites and/or web pages, in-stream ad units cannot conventionally be placed in that way. Typically, slots for in-stream ad units are filled by providers of the content objects to stream the content object with preset in-stream ad units that are the same for all end users. For example, a web site hosting video would find an advertiser that would provide an in-stream ad unit to embed into a content object that is served from the web site such that all viewers would receive the same ads.
There are a variety of techniques to distribute and receive media data (e.g., audio files, video files, etc.) over a computer network. For example, podcasting is the distribution of media data, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet using World Wide Web (Web) feeds. Advertisers advertise on podcasts by placing advertisements in the distributed media data. For example, a listener may listen to a short radio announcement from an advertiser before the start of the radio program.
Currently, advertisements are manually combined with the media data such that the advertisements become a permanent part of the media data. For example, once the advertisement is placed at the start of the radio program, the advertisement will always play at the start of the radio program. An advertiser cannot change the advertisement to a different time or location within the radio program.
Furthermore, to determine the effectiveness of advertisements, advertisers typically track the number of times the advertisements are distributed or downloaded. A conventional tracking technique is to access the server logs to determine how many times the media data has been transmitted. However, accessing the server logs is inconvenient and the server logs cannot track when the advertisement was actually downloaded. Another conventional tracking technique is to attach a redirect (e.g., Universal Resource Locator (URL)) directed to a tracking service at the header of a response. Thus, instead of providing the media data, an URL to the media data is provided in the response. Every time the media data is requested, a client is redirected to the tracking service that tracks the number of times the advertisements are requested and provides the media data with the advertisements to the client. Therefore, to accurately track the advertisements, a redirect must be attached to every reference to the media file. Since there may be a large number of references to the media data across the Internet and because some of those references may be outside the control of the content owner, it is difficult to ensure that a redirect is attached to all requests. Thus, the attachment of redirects to track advertisements can be highly inaccurate.
As a result, there is a need for continuing efforts to improve the placement of advertisements or other contents on media data transmitted over a computer network.